Will accountants dominate planners?
A significant divergence of views has emerged over the degree to which accountants will choose to become licensed under the Government's proposed new regime and whether, in doing so, they will overwhelm some financial planners.
Count Financial chairman and founder Barry Lambert has written in Money Management that he believes many accountants will choose to become licensed and that planners will need to think about how to stop accountants taking their clients.
By comparison, Premium Wealth Advisers chief executive Paul Harding-Davis believes accountants will take a much more studied approach and will probably do very little before 2015 in the expectation of changes flowing from a change of Government and further lobbying around the new licensing arrangements.
However Lambert has written in this week's Money Management that the next big impact on the financial planning sector will be the licensing of accountants.
"Accountants will become licensed in numbers," Lambert writes.
"Although they were slow to move into financial planning, they cannot afford to let this opportunity pass them by. The question is, "will they become fully licensed or part licensed?".
"My position is: ‘Why do 90 per cent of the training for a restricted licence?'. So accountants are likely to become fully-licensed in numbers," his column said.
Lambert pointed to the fact that credibility surveys had repeatedly shown accountants as the preferred financial adviser over financial planners by a considerable margin.
"Almost every financial planning or life insurance conference I've seen has a topic: ‘How to get referrals from accountants'. That will soon change to ‘How to stop accountants from taking your financial planning clients'," he writes.
"Of course, they will really be taking back their own clients. They will also be enhancing the value of their business by providing financial planning services to existing accounting and tax clients."
AUTHOR
Mike Taylor
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